The invention relates to a device with which textile fiber bundles, consisting of n finite, individual fibers (n=2, 3, 4 . . . ) adhering to one another, can be mechanically split up into fiber bundles with less than n individual fibers, even down to individual fibers.
When processing fibrous materials, it is very important to have them available in a heavily isolated form or, more precisely, only in the form of thin or finer residual fiber bundles starting at a certain processing stage.
Fibrous materials frequently only exist in the form of fiber bundles in the starting material, however, or there are high proportions contained in the starting material. This could, on the one hand, be cut-fiber bundles in a length range of 3 to 100 mm, mechanically opened natural fibers or textile-type products such as fibrous fabric, multiaxial fibrous layings and braids based on multi-filament or staple fiber yarns from which individual fibers are to be obtained.
A multitude of different techniques are applied on a material-specific basis today for bundle-separating processes of that type. They are textile separators, tearing machines, combs or carding machines as a rule. They are very expensive in terms of the machinery and can only be used for certain materials containing fiber bundles and sometimes only when fiber shortening, mechanical damage or only minor fiber-bundle splitting effects are accepted. It is frequently necessary to run the material through several systems one after the other for an adequate effect. Textile separators, combs and carding machines only work with fiber bundles with lengths of around 30-100 mm when the requirement is met that the fibers have curling. Tearing machines are used for multiaxial layings, fabric and woven materials in lumps. There is no known device to efficiently unravel or split up fiber bundles for cut bundles of short fibers with the customary bundle lengths of 3 to 12 mm and also in general for smooth fiber bundles without fiber curling.
Bundles of natural fibers are refined via combing processes in special machines or have to be chemically separated.
The drawbacks of these methods are:                High expenses for equipment and energy        Limited universality with regard to the use of material        High levels of mechanical damage and severe fiber shortening, especially in the case of tearing machines.        Unsuitability for smooth fiber bundles or any short-fiber bundles.        
A characteristic of all of these mechanical processes is that the material is separated into fibers with pins and toothed rollers; either different rollers operate in a combing fashion against one another or a roller rips the material out of a fixed material clamping unit.
Only a method and a device for unraveling fabrics into the fiber components are known according to DE 199 00 770 A1, with which bundle-splitting effects of this type can be sporadically created as an incidental side effect. This device that is described in DE 199 00 770 A1 is only useful for applications in the area of textile recycling and specifically here only for turning planar fabric pieces into their yarn components. Fabric is exclusively used here as a starting material; the main objective of the device described above consists in destroying the fiber crossings and weavings at right angles between the warp and weft yarns that were created in a defined way in the weave existing in the fabrics for the purpose of recovering these fibers. According to DE 199 00 770 A1, an unraveling of filament yarn sections, even down to individual fibers, simultaneously comes about in the process in a few cases when there are fabrics made of filament yarns. That is an incidental side effect that only arises in rare cases, but it is not adequate for an economical exploitation of the effect. Only the use of this device that was described would not be sufficient for separation of the fibers right down to individual fibers. Further additional, subsequent mechanical process steps in accordance with claim 9 in DE 199 00 770 A1 have to be added to that.